By Stephen Kalin, WSJ May 17, 2022
JENIN, West Bank—Two decades after Israel invaded a sprawling refugee camp here with tanks and helicopters and flattened homes in response to the second Intifada, the area is re-emerging as a stronghold of Palestinian militancy.
Four of the assailants who killed 19 Israelis in terrorist attacks since March were from the Jenin region, in the far north reaches of the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967. The Israeli military has responded by conducting deadly raids into the city, surrounding villages and the adjacent refugee camp, which is under nominal Palestinian Authority control, to arrest people they say helped carry out those attacks.
The Israeli raids are regularly met with gunfire. At least 40 Palestinians have been killed since March 1 in the West Bank and Israel, nearly half of who were from Jenin, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Dozens have been arrested, according to Israeli officials.
Jenin is caught between increasingly regular Israeli incursions and armed Palestinian fighters.
Romana village on the outskirts of Jenin.
The fighting around Jenin shows how the deadliest battleground between the Israelis and Palestinians has shifted from the Gaza Strip to parts of the West Bank, where militant groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have developed extensive networks of support.
“Jenin has become a world of invasions, gunfire and martyrs,” said Hammam Hazem, 22, the younger brother of a Palestinian from Jenin who opened fire in a cafe in Tel Aviv’s popular Dizengoff Street in April, killing three Israelis. “Life here has become a city of war.”
Jenin is caught between increasingly regular Israeli incursions and armed Palestinian fighters. On a recent weekend evening, a band of muscular 20- and 30-year-olds clad in black tore through the camp’s narrow alleys in a silvery minivan, flashing automatic weapons. A father nonchalantly carried his toddler past the armed men.
Alternately jocular and threatening, the men said they don’t mind dying in clashes with the Israeli forces because they feel their lives are already over.
Hammam Hazem, the brother of a Jenin Palestinian who killed Israelis in Tel Aviv.
“All we want is to live, to live with dignity, and not as sheep,” one of them said. “We only carry these weapons to fight and live in freedom. If they don’t enter the camp, there will be no fighting.”
Israeli incursions into the area continue almost daily. While covering an Israeli raid in Jenin on Wednesday, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed while wearing protective gear that identified her as a member of the press. Israel and the Palestinian Authority have launched separate investigations amid conflicting accounts of her killing.
In a camp raid the day after Ms. Abu Akleh’s death, an Israeli police officer was shot and later died; the police heavily damaged a home and said they arrested a wanted militant. On Sunday evening, hundreds of men marched through the streets of Jenin carrying M-16s and other assault rifles and threatened revenge against Israel for killing the brother of a senior Palestinian militant. The march a sign of how the Western-backed Palestinian Authority is struggling to control of the city, having failed to confiscate weapons and facing pressure from a variety of militant groups.
Flowers laid on the spot journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed.
Sheep on outskirts of Jenin.
Palestinian officials contend that Israel’s raids have inflamed the situation in the camp, while undermining the Palestinian Authority’s ability to provide stability and security in the area.
“Leave me, as the authority, to live in this situation and confront it,” said Gen. Akram Rajoub, the Palestinian Authority governor of Jenin. “As an Israeli, what do you have here?”
The PA started disarming the camp in 2005 and Fatah dismantled its armed wing, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, as part of a larger campaign across the West Bank to control weapons and keep the territory in the hands of PA security forces. But within a few years, residents of the Jenin camp began to rearm.
A senior Israeli military official said the army needs to conduct raids into Jenin to stop terrorism in Israel. “We don’t have the ability to wait for the next attack from Jenin, we cannot sit and wait for our civilians to be killed,” the official said. “In general and more specifically in recent weeks, we’re acting to stop those who want to kill Israelis now, right now, so that they’re stopped before they carry out their murderous intent.”
A self-proclaimed resistance fighter in Jenin.
The Jenin camp is notorious on both sides of the conflict, alternatively viewed as the cradle of Palestinian resistance and a hotbed of terrorism.
Its roughly 100 acres house refugees and their descendants who were displaced in 1948 upon the creation of Israel, totaling about 14,000 people. It was mostly rebuilt after the 2002 incursion, called Operation Defensive Shield by the Israeli military, and the broader area saw development including the upgrade of a border crossing between Jenin and Israel to allow for vehicular traffic, which is vital to the local economy.
The fiercest battles between Israelis and Palestinians in recent years have been concentrated in the Gaza Strip, including an 11-day war last year. While the West Bank has also seen violence, in Jenin it was largely outpaced by stability and economic growth that attracted new restaurants, shopping malls and tourist attractions.
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Israeli security forces assaulted mourners before the funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh in a day of violence that saw the death of an Israeli police officer. Photo: Maya Levin/Associated Press
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has enacted policies to help improve the Palestinian economy, including adding 15,000 permits for workers who wish to enter Israel. About 140,000 Palestinians have permits to work in Israel, according to the country. The number in Israel without permits has fallen dramatically since the country launched a crackdown in April on people crossing through openings in the West Bank separation barrier, according to the Tel Aviv-based labor rights organization Kav LaOved. Thousands without permits remain in the country, the organization said.
Now the deteriorating situation is jeopardizing economic gains, with Israeli and Palestinian officials, business and residents warning of escalating violence.
Isam al-Nimer, a businessman and professor at the Arab American University in Jenin.
Ali Baba Palace restaurant opened in Jenin in September.
Eitan Dangot, a former senior Israeli military official, said that de-escalation in Jenin was still possible but warned that violence and incitement by militant groups in coming weeks could prompt a large Israeli military operation.
“We are in a very sensitive juncture,” he said.
Another sustained operation could devastate the area, said Isam al-Nimer, a professor at the Arab American University in Jenin and a businessman whose family owns local gas stations, a mall and an office building.
“We could return to what we experienced in the early 2000s,” said Mr. al-Nimer. “I have a feeling that something is coming.”
Palestinian restaurant owner Wasef Freihat pumped $2 million into his native Jenin, anticipating that relative calm would sustain visits by well-heeled Arab tourists from inside Israel. He opened Ali Baba Palace last September in a cavernous building made of limestone and marble and decorated it with stained glass windows, Roman columns and frescoed ceilings that resemble Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. But these days, smartly dressed waiters wander past mostly empty tables.
“Anyone who has a business hopes there will be stability,” he said. “But because of the circumstances we live in, you don’t have stability or a fixed income because the political reality dictates the economic situation.”
The camp’s maze of narrow alleyways is cramped and crowded. Residents face shortages of power and water, and unemployment and poverty are rampant. The Palestinian Authority’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported that unemployment in the Jenin region was 21.3% in 2020, the most recent year data is available. That is the second highest regional unemployment rate in the West Bank, after Bethlehem.
In interviews, militants and their families said their actions were justified because of Israel’s brutal occupation and its handling of access to Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, where Israeli police and Palestinians fought for days during Ramadan, which overlapped with Passover, in April. Despite the economic hardship many in Jenin endure, some of the men, like Mr. Hammam and those who were accused of killing three Israelis this month in the largely ultraorthodox town of Elad, were making good money, their families said.
After the men were arrested, engineers drilled holes and took measurements in preparation for razing the houses.
Hadeel, 6, the sister of Asad al-Refai who was arrested last week.
The father of Asad al-Refai, who was arrested last week with his childhood friend and neighbor over allegations he used an ax in the Elad attack, renounced the violence and said the families would have tried to stop the men had they known their intentions. He attributed his son’s actions to the daily humiliations of occupation. His son, he said, was particularly angry about how Israeli police violated the sanctity of Al Aqsa by wearing shoes indoors and beating Palestinian worshipers there, including women. Israeli police have said they were responding to rioting.
“As long as the Jews are squeezing people and targeting Al Aqsa, the Palestinian people will be a thorn in their throats,” Mr. Refai said at a neighbor’s home in the village of Rumana, which is 11 miles northwest of the Jenin camp. “As long as women bear children, there will be those who continue to carry out attacks.”
After the men were arrested, the Israeli army raided their homes. Intelligence officers questioned the families, while engineers drilled holes in the walls and took measurements in preparation for razing the houses. The men’s relatives say they have lost permission to work in Israel, depriving the families of vital income.
For noncombatants, the recurring Israeli raids and proliferation of guns complicate the camp’s already challenging living conditions.
Hilal Jalamneh’s family was left without electricity or water for six days when their home was destroyed in the 2002 Israeli invasion. He lays the blame for the current escalation on Israel and fears that the camp environment will push his children toward violence.
“I’m scared they will die, that they will pick up a rock or a gun,” said Mr. Jalamneh, 47, as a single gunshot sounded outside his rebuilt home. “We really are between a rock and a hard place.”
Hilal Jalamneh fears that the camp’s environment will push his children toward violence.
Write to Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com
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